Hanna McCulloch's blog

When you spend as much time researching and talking about child poverty as I do it's easy to become disheartened. Remaining motivated and optimistic in the face of a projected 50% increase in child poverty by 2020 and swingeing social security cuts sometimes feels like a herculean task.

This comment was first printed in 'The National' on Thursday 9th July 2015

Despite the Chancellor’s assurances that this is a ‘one nation’ budget’, there should be no mistake that this is a budget which will exclude and deprive, widening the gap between the haves and the have nots and forcing more children across Scotland into poverty.

Back in March this year I spent three weeks in West Lothian food bank conducting interviews as part of Oxfam, CPAG and the Trussell Trust’s “Emergency Use Only” project. The research was a chance to get to the bottom of some of the questions a lot of us have about food bank use in Scotland. How - in one of the richest nations on earth - can 71,482 households have needed food parcels last year? And how should we react to food banks? Should we welcome them as an expression of society’s generosity or reject them as a symptom of its failure?